We are huge fans of Aadhaar & UPI: Google's Caeser Sengupta

Search giant Google is excited about partnering with the government on its Aadhaar and UPI programmes, and is discussing propositions that the two innovations can open up for themNeha Alawadhi, Surabhi Agarwal&Gulveen Aulakh | ET Bureau | Updated: September 28, 2016, 14:00 IST

Search giant Google is excited about partnering with the government on its Aadhaar and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) programmes, and is discussing propositions that the two innovations can open up for them.

Caeser Sengupta, vice-president of Next Billion Users, said the public WiFi programme entails some challenges but it is being extended to malls and public spaces, in an interview with ET's Neha Alawadhi, Surabhi Agarwal & Gulveen Aulakh.

The company is also in talks with telcos to front-end the WiFi project, as it complements the latter's data driving strategy.

Edited excerpts:

Where is Google in the talks with government on Aadhaar, UPI?

We are huge fans of the Indian stack ­- Aadhar, UPI ­- it's transforming. Aadhaar requires hardware changes, which come with additional cost. So, we are talking to the government to figure out how to work with them. There's lot of brainstorming going on internally.

Right now, a lot of our user cases don't require a physical identity, but if you do have one, maybe we can offer more interesting products and services. We are very excited about UPI, which I think will massively revolutionise payments. We're talking to NPCI and others to see how we can support it.

Have you identified areas for launching Google Station?

We are talking to a number of partners and we will soon announce some. We are looking for partners, who can help us think this through, expand in city public areas like malls or places like Chowpatty. We would love to do this in a university area, like Delhi University. I was talking to an operator in Indonesia and they were saying that you have done this in India with RailTel, can you do some of this in Indonesia, we want to expand into remote cities.

Are you open to partnering with government or telcos who already have fibre layouts?

Absolutely. Those are the kind of partners we are looking for. Any state that wants to partner with us, we are waiting with open arms. The way the partnership will work is like with a telco like RailTel, which brings the fibre, and we bring the WiFi infrastructure, the software stack, the monitoring, etc. We are seeing interest as it complements 4G efforts.

Is it revenue-generating?

Our monetisation efforts are focussed on making it sustainable for the venues than making it for us. Monetisation might happen in the future but right now, we are fortunate enough to be able to invest in this.

Your Loon project seems to have hit a roadblock. Is it frustrating?

It is not frustrating, but we have to work according to the local laws and the desires of each government. Some places will take a lot more time.

No, We're beginning to do that in a number of countries. India has always been a complicated market, but we're very happy with how it has gone here. Part of it, and maybe we were responsible for it, there was the perception that volume was a big goal for us.

Instead, we wanted to help the ecosystem take things like software updates more seriously.